My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

KRAMPUSLAUF BY HOLLY BLACK

Fairmont’s second annual Krampuslauf felt a little bit like a parade and a lot like a zombie crawl, except instead of the undead, we were dressed up like Saint Nick’s creepy buddy, the Krampus. Fairmont wasn’t a place where we’d usually spend the afternoon. It was full of overpriced boutiques, overpriced coffee, and Mossley Academy, which was full of overpriced assholes.

Everything wrong with Fairmont was exemplified in the Krampuslauf. It was for charity and came with free hot chocolate. They had turned the whole thing into something completely against the true spirit of Krampusnacht, which ought to be about scaring the living shit out of people, running around with torches and whips, screaming in the faces of crying children so they’d be good for goodness sake. Not hot chocolate. Not charity. The Fairmont Krampuslauf was exactly the kind of thing that rich people like Roth did. They took something awesome and sanitized it until it became something godawful.

Despite how Roth thought all Penny’s friends were ignorant, scum-sucking dirtbags because we went to an overcrowded public high school, I was smart enough to research Krampus. He’s an interesting guy, the son of Hel in Norse mythology. Older than the devil, too, so if they seem alike, it’s because the devil bit Krampus’s style. I bet Roth doesn’t know any of that. I bet Roth just likes him because he looks cool.

I had hoped Penny would realize me and her and definitely Wren didn’t belong, and then we could go home or maybe do some holiday shopping at the good mall, since we’d driven all the way over. But, of course, Penny didn’t. She craned her neck, looking for Roth and his other girlfriend, the one who was rich and went to Mossley Academy and who Penny didn’t want to believe actually existed.

“This is a perfect chance to find out,” she’d said when she’d explained to me about the flyer she’d seen in Roth’s room, with the date circled in Sharpie. “We’ll be in disguise.”

That part was fun. We made horns out of papier-mâché—ripping up old newspapers and mixing them with flour and water. The resulting gluey slop had stuck in our hair, clumped on our clothes, and made six sweet-looking horns.

Penny’s were the sharp, spiky kind that stuck up from the forehead. Wren’s were the curved kind that formed part of a spiral, like a ram. And mine were the kind that shot straight back over my head. We painted them silver, tipped with red, and raided our closets for demonic clothes. I found my grandmother’s weird old shaggy fur cape. Wren has some crazy spiked shoes that don’t have heels and look like hooves. And Penny has a red thrift-store Venetian mask with a long, phallic nose to keep Roth from recognizing her. I thought we looked pretty damn festive.

When I was a kid, I didn’t understand that Santa’s elves weren’t the kind from storybooks. I thought his toy shop was staffed with fauns and boggarts, sprites and trolls, goblins and pixies. Before Mom left, when I made lists to give to Santa, they were always full of magical things. I wanted a cloak that could make me fly. I wanted a tiny doll, no bigger than my finger and as perfectly jointed as a living person. After Mom left, I wanted crystal balls with which to scrye my mother and magical chalk that could draw me a doorway to her, and a magical potion I could make her drink that would make her care about us.

Finally, someone explained to me that Santa’s elves weren’t those kind of elves and the list was just so Dad and Grandma didn’t have to think too hard about what to buy for me. After that, I started putting normal stuff on it, like skinny jeans and new sneakers.

We lined up in front of a desk where a nice lady let us write down our names. I could tell she wasn’t really impressed with our costumes.

“Season’s beatings!” yelled one guy in a green fur suit, with horns crafted out of red Solo cups and painted black. He wore colored contacts that turned his eyes yellow and saluted us with hot chocolate swishing back and forth in a massive earthenware goblet.

Maybe some of these folks knew how to scare people after all.

Wren and Penelope and I all got numbers that the registration lady called “race bibs” that we were supposed to safety pin to our clothes. Once we managed that, we waded into the fray.

“There he is,” Penny said, pointing over to the chocolate line.

Roth was standing in a group of prep school Krampuses. Three girls in short tight red satin skirts with plastic horns from the costume store, big glittery fake lashes, and high heels. Two boys with Krampus masks pushed up onto their heads so they could drink from the white Styrofoam cups.

They looked clean and mint-in-box, the way rich kids somehow managed. Like the blond girl Roth had his arm around. My hair is blond, too, but that’s because I bleach it with stuff from the beauty supply store. Her hair grew from her head bright as spun white gold.

“That’s his girlfriend?” Wren frowned. “You could totally take her.”

“I’m not going to fight some girl from Mossley.” Penny’s curly black hair was a gorgeous nimbus around her face, and the carnival mask made her dangerous looking, but her black-lipsticked mouth trembled like she was about to cry. “She doesn’t even know about me. She probably thinks she’s his real girlfriend.”

She probably was his real girlfriend. The one he told his parents about. The one he took to dances and out for pizza and to places that weren’t the backseat of his car or Penelope’s bedroom. Penny had clearly not wanted to believe the girl existed, somehow convincing herself that we were dressing up and coming all this way to prove an unprovable negative.

Wren shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

Wren had been more or less raised by her grandparents, on whose fold-out couch she slept. They taught her to skin squirrels, knee guys hard enough to rupture their testicles, and roll cigarettes as tight as ones in the store. She had no patience with the rest of us.

“Let’s go get hot chocolate,” I told them. My job was to be the negotiator and sometimes the tie-breaker, an ambassador to both their nations. In return, they didn’t call me crazy when I dreamed up stuff like papier-mâché horns, so even though I sometimes wanted to quit that job, I never would.

“No,” Penny said, with a little sob. “I don’t want him to see us. What if he recognizes me?”

Wren grabbed her arm. “Then either he’ll introduce you to his friends or he’ll stand there awkwardly until his friends introduce themselves to us. Either way, he’s busted. This is what you came for.”

Penny wilted, even though she’d come up with this plan herself. That’s why Wren and I were along—to force her to go through with her own scheme.

As we waded through the crowd toward Roth, a guy passed me. He was wearing an amazing outfit, the best I’d seen. He had on fur leggings, tight to his calves, tapering to the most amazing hooves, so good that they didn’t look like a costume. A black Utilikilt covered his waist, so the transition between fur and flesh was hidden, and despite the cold, his very fine chest was bare. He had big beautiful horns like those of a springbok rising up from his head. They were so real that I figured they were either resin molds or actual horns that he’d managed to attach to some kind of hidden hairband. His tanned skin was smeared with the deep gold of old mirrors, and his eyes were lined with black kohl.

“You look awesome,” I called to him, because he really did. If all Krampuses looked like him, naughtiness would rule.

He turned and gave me a mischievous, toe-curling smile. It was like he’d stepped out of a different, better story than the kind I knew—not the one that Roth was in, born to be a rich jerk and to reap the rewards of never rising above that. Not the kind Penny and Wren and I were in, either, where we had to be realistic all the time, whatever that meant. No, the boy with the goat legs seemed to distort reality a little in absolutely fantastic ways.

Wren had to drag me away. I grinned on as Penny and I were hauled to the hot-chocolate line.

“You guys are the worst,” Penny said in a muffled voice.

“You mean the best,” Wren told her, and then elbowed me in the side.

“Hey,” I yelled to Roth, waving. I wasn’t sure if that was what I was supposed to do to avoid getting elbowed again, but I figured Wren would be happy with any forward momentum.

Penny gave me an evil look, which looked extra evil from behind her mask.

For a moment, Roth seemed confused, then he realized how he knew me and I saw the beginnings of panic. After months of watching Penny suffer because of him, it was satisfying. “I don’t think I know y—” he started.

“Hi,” Wren said to the blond girl, interrupting him. “You must be Roth’s girlfriend. He’s told us so much about you. So much. Don’t worry—all good stuff.”

The girl smiled, which was pretty damning. None of the other kids looked at all surprised, like of course Roth would tell a bunch of people about how cool his girl was. Roth began turning a tomato red, shut his mouth and ground his teeth.

I knew Penelope was considering escaping—we were at a run, after all, so if she just ran, it wouldn’t look crazy or anything. I hoped Wren had a good grip on her.

“We’re having an absolutely brutal New Year’s party,” Wren continued, and this was why you shouldn’t bring Wren to things if you didn’t want chaos. She loved chaos above all other things. “You should all come. Roth knows how hard we go. I guarantee you’d have a good time. Right, Roth?”

Roth stammered something affirmative. He knew he couldn’t afford to piss us off. Call us scum-sucking dirtbags now, I thought. Double-dog dare you.

There was just one problem. We hadn’t been planning on having a New Year’s party. The last party I remember one of us having involved birthday cake, candles, and a Slip ’n Slide.

The blonde looked intrigued, though. We were townies and, to her, that meant we had drugs and booze and enough space to party without getting in trouble. The first one was silly, because, sure, we could get drugs. Anyone could, if they had the cash and the hookup. But at Mossley, dealers stopped by and delivered drugs straight to their door.

She was right about the other two, though. We had booze, because we had older siblings and cousins who would buy it for us, and liquor cabinets in our houses that our parents never bothered to lock, and because, compared to drugs, booze was dirt cheap.

And we had freedom. We could stay out all night for the price of a sloppy lie. No one was concerned about where we were for hours at a time and sometimes a lot longer than that. Theoretically, all of the Mossley students went home for winter break, but most of them drifted back the first week of January. After all, they spent most of the year here. Who did they know at home?

“Okay, yeah,” the girl said, looking from her friends to Roth, to me and Penny and Wren and smiling her oblivious smile. “That sounds like fun.”

My dad was fond of bringing home stuff he thought was still usable. Slightly moldering books from the local college, damaged sports equipment and used furniture he spotted leaning against dumpsters. He was responsible for the book that confused me about the faeries—and also got me to leave milk curdling in the sun outside Grandma’s trailer in the hopes of attracting a brownie to clean my room—and there was another book with devil stories.

The devil stories were a lot like the faerie stories. The devil was always a trickster, always seemed up for a good time, and was usually defeated in the end. In the stories where he prevailed and dragged a soul down to hell, the person usually deserved it.

He punished the naughty and rewarded the nice. Just like someone else who wore a lot of red. Scramble the letters in S-A-N-T-A and you get S-A-T-A-N.

It turned out Roth’s girlfriend’s name was Silke, which seemed completely improbable, but apparently was the kind of Nordic name that went with naturally ice-blond hair and swimming-pool blue eyes.

Wren plugged her number into my cell. Roth watched Penny like she was a dangerous animal who might suddenly bite him. I wished she would. Behind her mask, Penny was probably red-nosed and blotchy from crying, but from the outside at least, she looked like an avenging devil. Roth was right to be afraid.

Then Wren gave an address for this New Year’s party. My dead grandmother’s not-as-yet-sold trailer.

“Wren—” I said, trying to inject myself into the process. But Wren kept talking until it became too late to stop her. Which was, I reminded myself, the problem with Wren’s brand of chaos. She was always making the trouble the rest of us had to wriggle out of.

I had no idea what she was thinking. How would this help Penny?

I couldn’t picture anyone from Mossley at a trailer park, no less Roth and his friends. I was sure that was part of what Wren thought would be awesome about it, imagining Silke’s distress as she wobbled around the pickup trucks and plastic reindeer in her high heels, Roth on her arm. And Grandma’s trailer wasn’t a bad spot for a party, per se. I could volunteer to clear it out, a job that my dad had been avoiding. It might be fun to have a party.

But not a party with Roth and the kids from Mossley. Not a party that we couldn’t even pretend was cool, because they’d be there reminding us that it sucked.

I glared at her.

Wren’s grin only got wider.

“You can invite him, too,” she turned and pointed. When I pivoted, I realized she was talking about the hot Krampus boy I’d called to earlier, who was behind us in line, close enough to have heard her. My cheeks scorched, and I probably looked as ridiculous and sputtering as Roth had. The bare-chested, gold-streaked Krampus tipped his head toward us, in acknowledgment of being noticed.

“Want to come to a New Year’s party?” I called to him, in an act of uncharacteristic daring. It was only November fifth—officially Krampusnacht—so it was remotely possible he hadn’t firmed up plans.

“It would be my pleasure,” he said in a voice that shivered down my spine, a voice that seemed to come from a reality that had gotten a little bent.

“Bring all your friends,” Penny said with a vengeful smile in my direction, as though messing with Roth at the Krampuslauf was our fault and not her idea. As though maybe there was something wrong with the hot Krampus boy bringing his friends to a party in a trailer park. As though I had something to be ashamed of.

A few minutes later, we got our steaming Styrofoam cups of marshmallow-strewn chocolate and started the Krampuslauf, loping along for a half mile as Penny cursed out us, cursed out Roth, and cursed out love. Then we ditched and headed for the good mall.

It wasn’t like I didn’t understand about crappy boyfriends. I’d had one too. His name was Nicandro, and he’d been way too old for me. After we broke up, I was so messed up that instead of dating anyone else, I made up a boyfriend with an equally extravagant name.

Joachim.

I wrote his name on my notebooks in Sharpie, like he was a real person. So yeah, I understood how Penny could pretend that Roth loved her. After all, I’d pretended a whole person into being.

I figured the New Year’s party wouldn’t turn into a real thing, but I was wrong. The more time passed, the more the idea came alive in my mind. Even though it had started to goad Roth, and maybe even get Silke and him to come, it became more than that.

Although it was definitely still that, too.

“No, they’re coming,” Pen said, lying on my floor, scrolling through the messages on her phone. “Roth swears. And he said that he was sorry about not introducing me to Silke, but he’d just been so surprised to see us. We probably should have told him we were going.”

“So she’s not his girlfriend?” Somehow the toad had convinced her not to dump him yet again.

Penny sighed, long-sufferingly. “Kind of. I mean, I guess he never said we were exclusive.”

“He said you were his girlfriend,” Wren said. She sat in front of the pieces of cracked mirror I’d glued to the wall and ran her fingers over her half-shaved head, checking for too-long pieces.

“Not his only girlfriend.” She answered this too quickly, like maybe she was parroting back excuses Roth had given her. “Anyway, he promises that he’s going to drop her after the holidays. Before New Year’s Eve. He just doesn’t want her to be sad when they go home. Their parents know one another.”

Wren snorted. “Whatever. He’s a liar. So about the party…”

No one we knew had the kind of fancy New Year’s parties I was imagining. Not like the kind in black-and-white movies. The kind where people wore long, glittering silver gowns and drank champagne out of coupe glasses and kissed one another at midnight. The kind I was determined to somehow throw, despite our limited resources and even more limited experience.

“Probably someone has those,” Penelope said when I explained my vision.

“Roth’s parents,” Wren said. “State senators. Movie stars. People who get cars for Christmas. People who spend Christmas at ski chalets. Not us. You can’t have one of those parties in a trailer.”

“Sure I can,” I said, gripped by compulsion. Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality. “Sort of. We all dress up. And we make, like, canapés instead of onion dip.”

Wren started to laugh. “Canapés? What the hell are those?”

“Finger food,” I said. “Crackers with stuff on them. If you want us to use my dead grandmother’s place to throw a party, it has to be the kind where we wear a gown and drink out of real glasses. No plastic cups or bags of chips or ripped T-shirts. It has to be nice. Otherwise, I’m out.”

They agreed, which I later realized meant that I not only needed to finagle the keys to the trailer, but that I had to actually throw a party worthy of all my big talking. When I volunteered to clean out Grandma’s trailer, Dad looked at me like he could see exactly what I was planning, but he gave me permission all the same.

“She had a lot of junk,” he said, from his chair in front of the television. A crime show was playing, and he had a big cup of tea balanced on his stomach.

“Some of it was nice,” said my stepmother, Anne. She was sitting on the couch, our pit bull, Lady, resting her box of a head on Anne’s lap. “Don’t throw out anything nice, okay? We could have a garage sale.”

“You’re not going to have a garage sale,” Dad snapped at her. “It’s all just going to rot in our basement.”

Lady blinked, roused from her nap. She let out a gentle wuff of concern.

“We could get the good stuff appraised,” Anne said. She and Dad had been together too long for her to pay attention to his moods. “Sell it online.”

“Oh, yeah, and who is going to pack up those boxes?” He threw up his hands, making the tea slosh in his cup. “Who is going to take them to the post office? It won’t be you!”

And just like that, my party was forgotten. I escaped with the keys and no particular instructions. I went over to the trailer, sat on Grandma’s worn velveteen sofa, and schemed. My grandmother had been the kind of lady who loved to drink and smoke and tell stories about being a nurse and the wild times she got up to before she married my grandfather. I hoped that if her spirit watched over the place, she’d be glad to be watching over a party.

My dad always said that I was a good kid with a great imagination, but also that I was a little bit of a space cadet. Anne told him he couldn’t say stuff like that to me. That it wasn’t good for my self-esteem.

When he first married her, I wasn’t sure how things would be, but she was sweet and normal and not at all like my real mom, who’d been fond of flying into rages and throwing things and who was off somewhere in New Mexico, committing credit card fraud. Our first Christmas together, Anne sewed me a tiny doll with jointed cloth limbs and thin embroidery floss for hair. I guess Dad had told her about my old Christmas lists.

I didn’t let her know, but I’d teared up when I saw the doll. I was too old for it, but I didn’t care. I carried her around in my purse, until she got so sticky with Jolly Ranchers and marked up by pens that I had to retire her to a bookshelf in my room. For a few months after that Christmas, I pretended Anne was my real mother.

I guess that’s what gave me the idea of pretending about Joachim.

No matter where I looked, there were things piled neatly upon piles of other things, deceptively tidy until I started dismantling them. Shoeboxes stacked under the bed. A closet crammed full of clothes. A dresser so full the drawers didn’t open. A glass-fronted cabinet piled with two sets of dishes and seemingly endless glassware. The ironware bowl she would let me put milk in for the faeries, which she called by the Sicilian name, donas de fuera. The glass terrarium arranged with succulents, marbles, and a few of my old Star Wars figures. The Santa Claus plate for cookies. Dozens of hand towels and napkins and bath towels. Boxes of jewelry, boxes of holiday decorations, unlit themed candles from decades back, and dozens upon dozens of ceramic figurines.

It was a treasure trove.

I found cookbooks from the sixties and seventies with pictures of people in front of trays of crackers or pots of fondue. I found champagne coupes, shot glasses, aperitif glasses, and highballs. I found long sparkly dresses in silver and pink and gold, with shoes to match. I found rhinestone necklaces and even a half-full bottle of Scotch.

Wren came over with her friend Ahmet, and we worked on hauling out stuff we didn’t need for the party. I kept all the old photos for Dad, the sets of china and some of the jewelry for Anne, and some of the clothes for me. We took the big wooden cabinet down to a consignment shop and managed to trade it for more glassware, including a little ice bucket. We threw out loads of slips, towels, and greeting cards.

Then I started to really plan.

We needed food.

We needed booze.

We needed music.

We needed décor.

And we needed guests.

We pooled our Christmas cash, and I borrowed Dad’s Costco card. We bought a whole wheel of Brie, a block of cheddar, a bunch of grapes, and tiny, individual quiches that cooked in the oven. We also got chips, crackers, hummus, and salsa, and fancy glass bottles of Coke. It wasn’t exactly my dream of canapés, but I figured that once it was all arranged on trays surrounded by grapes, it would look pretty nice.

Then we arranged for the drinks. Penelope had a cousin we could pay extra to get booze for us. I would make a big vodka punch in Grandma’s punchbowl, and then hopefully we could pool our funds and get some bottles of Korbel, a few more of André, and a case of supercheap beer. I know that over at Mossley, they probably guzzled capital-C champagne, the kind that comes from the Champagne region of France. But no matter how classy I wanted our party to be or how much I read about fancy things, I knew Korbel was stretching the limits of my budget.

It would have to do.

Ahmet agreed to make a playlist on his phone and had the stuff to run it through Grandma’s ancient sound system. We texted our crew from school. Wren even asked a guy she liked from the local coffee shop if he’d come. He said he had another party to go to, but he’d try to stop by, and ever since she’d been trying to play like the possibility wasn’t on her mind a lot.

For décor, I fished through all the Christmas decorations and picked out the strings of fairy lights. Wren, Penny, and I hung them from the ceiling of the trailer and from the trees outside. We stuck candles in silver snowflake candleholders, covered the furniture in white sheets, and polished trays until they gleamed.

It took a week and a half of work to get the place shipshape. Some nights I would stay overnight at the trailer, stretched out on the scratchy sheets of Grandma’s bed, a brightly woven afghan over my feet. I thought that maybe I’d dream of her, but instead I dreamed of the gold-smeared Krampus. In my dreams, he flayed off all my skin with his whips, and underneath I was made from pressed glass, like one of Grandma’s pretty trays. Then the glass cracked and fell, sharp shards of ice melting in the torch fire, and my real self was underneath, a self no one had ever seen before.

You created me, he said, eyes bright and hot as coals. But once you create a thing, you can’t always control it.

I was raw and trembling in front of him. I opened my mouth to speak, to beg for him not to hurt me or maybe to hurt me more, I wasn’t sure which—and then woke, sweat cooling on my skin.

After that, I tried not to sleep so much. After all, there was lots of work to do.

The night before New Year’s Eve, I moved on to fixing up the outside of the trailer. I arranged some lawn chairs around an outdoor table and lit some more candles to make a smoking parlor. I hung silver Christmas-tree ball ornaments from the trees with fishing wire. Then, finally, I took a step back and looked around. It was beautiful. Glimmering. Magical.

One of the other things my dad had brought back from dumpster-diving was occultist Aleister Crowley’s book, Magick. I remember his definition of magic vividly: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.”

I’d willed this into being. For a moment, I felt like a magician.

Then my vision shifted, and I saw the place as Roth and Silke were going to see it, as the boy in gold with the beautiful, no-doubt-expensive costume would see it. A sad, ramshackle trailer hung with a bunch of cheap lights.

“They’re not really coming,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“What?” Wren sat in the open doorway, trying to fit into a pair of narrow silver shoes that she’d borrowed from Penelope. She never wore heels.

“The Mossley kids. Roth. Silke. Why would he let his friends come when he knows having two girlfriends at the same party is a recipe for disaster? He wouldn’t. And why would Silke come to a trailer park? What if no one else comes, either? What if it’s just us at this party?”

“Then we get loaded,” Wren said. “Really, really, really loaded.”

I sighed, slumping in a lawn chair. “And eat all those little quiches by ourselves. And cry.”

Wren and I had been friends for years, since we’d met at the muddy pond the town called a swimming hole. She was trying to drown a boy she liked and got in trouble with his mother. Penny and I rescued her by lying and saying the boy had started it. Which pretty much set a precedent. One of us would get in boy trouble, and the other two had to bail her out.

Even though Penny and I had known each other longer, Wren was the one who knew my dumbest secret. After Wren found out about my fake boyfriend, I’d had to have a fake breakup with fake texts and everything so Penny didn’t guess. If they’d both known, we would all have had to talk about it.

It was too bad. My fake boyfriend was the best boyfriend I’d never had.

Joachim was a name I’d found on a website that I’d stumbled across when I was looking up the meaning of my own name. It stuck in my head until it came blurting out of my mouth as a boy I really liked, a boy who never existed. After that, I just embroidered the lie. I made up details about his life, about how we met online and how we had plans for him to come up that summer. I sent myself long e-mails full of things we would do in the future, nicknames for one another and lines copied from favorite movies and books and then showed off those e-mails like they were real. I made him into the one person who truly understood me—and weirdly, sometimes he seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.

With my fingers, he wrote that all I needed was to believe that the world wasn’t one way. That it was big enough to contain a lot of different stories in it, big enough to be unpredictable. But I wasn’t sure how to believe him. I knew it was only me talking.

After I’d been found out and “broke up” with Joachim, I cried into my pillow for so long that my face was swollen and puffy at school the next day. Penny snuck out during lunch and came back with a mocha Frappuccino of sympathy. Wren, knowing that both the breakup and the boyfriend were fake, spent the day marveling and being creeped out by my acting prowess.

A couple of nights later, when I couldn’t sleep, I went outside and sat on the stairs in front of my house. Looking up at the glow of streetlights buzzing with moths and feeling the shiver of the wind, I wished that the stars or Santa’s elves or Satan himself would bring me someone like Joachim—or at least give me some kind of sign that the world was big enough and unpredictable enough to contain someone like him—then I’d be as good or bad as I needed to be to deserve it.

“Let’s text Silke,” Wren said, pulling out her phone. A few minutes later she was grinning.

“What?”

“You were totally right. He told his friends the party was off. But I told her that Roth was a piece of shit who was cheating on her and that she should come anyway. I told her we could prove it.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“She cursed me out, too.” She raised both her eyebrows. “But if she comes, we give her details.”

I groaned. “Penny will never forgive us—”

Wren cut me off. “If we want Pen to dump Roth, we’re going to have to prove to Pen that he’s a rat. Now we just have to prove it to Silke, too.”

“There’s nothing we can do about the way she feels. We’re her friends. Our job is to roll our eyes and stand by her, right?”

“Well, I have a plan,” Wren said, looking at me like I was a little slow. “I figured we’d get Roth really drunk and confess to being a douchenozzle, and if that didn’t work, I thought we’d trap him in the bathroom until he told the truth.”

I wanted to take the phone out of her hand and see what she’d told Silke and what she’d said back. “That’s a terrible plan. That may be literally the worst plan you’ve ever had.”

Wren shrugged. “I just think he would admit stuff eventually, that’s all. Although I guess eventually someone else would want to pee.”

Wren seemed to just know things about people. Often those things turned out to be true. But I wasn’t so sure about her intuition this time.

“Anyway,” she said, standing up and wobbling in the borrowed heels. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t come. We need a new plan and that plan should be to get Silke and Pen to compare notes so they see he’s been running a game on them.”

In that moment, I wished I could take back the whole party. It had been a ton of work, I was broke, and now I was pretty sure it would be a catastrophe. But all I could do was go home, collapse on my bed, and promise myself that I was never, ever, ever volunteering to throw a party ever again, no matter how much I wished I was the kind of person who ate crudités and canapés.

Dad was right. I needed less imagination.

The next day, I crawled out, took a super-hot shower, and got ready for the party. I had borrowed a dress out of Grandma’s closet—a floor-length cocktail number in a shimmery silver-black semi-sheer fabric with billowy sleeves, heavy cuffs, and a peekaboo front.

I put on my Converse underneath it, since I still had a lot to do. I tried to pin up my hair, using a YouTube tutorial, but I rushed my way through, and it came out looking not quite right. My smoky eyes looked awesome, though, and I did that lipstick thing where you layer powder and pigment so the stuff is supposed to never come off.

After that, I told my dad I was spending the night at Penelope’s and headed out to buy ice to stick in the bathtub to cool the Cokes and beer and bottles of champagne, cut-up carrots, and make boozy punch.

“Call if you need a ride. Annie and I will be up until the ball drops,” Dad called after me, putting down a bowl of food for Lady, who was dancing around the kitchen in an eager circle.

Nothing got done on time. Even though Ahmet had plugged his phone into the stereo perfectly the last time, it took him an hour to make it happen on New Year’s—and that was after he was three hours late. Penelope’s cousin showed up without the booze, wanting me to make a list of what we needed all over again after demanding an extra twenty bucks for the errand. Wren came by in sweatpants, ready to work, but then needed to take a super long break to get ready—a break that involved Penny doing her hair in Grandma’s bathroom, so that neither of them helped me for the better part of two hours. After he was done setting up the electronics, Ahmet settled himself on the couch, eating all the crackers and cheese, making me paranoid that we would run out of crackers before the party even started (there was no way that we would ever run out of cheese). By the time the first guests showed up, I was nearly in tears. I greeted Sandy, Jen, and Xavier, pointed to the food, and then walked straight to Grandma’s bedroom in the back, kicking the door closed behind me and throwing myself down on her bed.

It still smelled like her: faded rose perfume, medicine, and dust, as though she’d been drying out and crumbling away instead of dying of cancer. Ahmet’s playlist pounded through the walls, urging me to go back to the party.

I didn’t go anywhere.

A knock sounded on the door. When I didn’t say anything, Penny came in, carrying two glasses of champagne. She was wearing a gold sequin tube dress. Her eyes were magnificent with golden lashes, golden powder, and liquid golden shadow.

“Hey,” I said, shoving myself up so that my head was resting against the headboard. “Just taking a break.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, holding out a coupe glass. “I put vodka in it. It wakes up the champagne.”

I took a deep swig. The bubbles stung my tongue deliciously. The vodka cut through the cheap sweetness of the André. I didn’t know if the champagne had woken up, but it woke me up. For the first time that day, I had a giddy feeling of anticipation. The feeling you were supposed to have when you went to a party. The feeling that as the night went on, reality might grow more malleable, like taffy, until anything could happen and everything might change.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I think our goal should be for you to fall in love tonight,” Penny said, taking a dainty sip from her own glass. “I am going to find someone for you to fall in love with.”

“Shouldn’t I get to pick?” I asked her.

“Fate picks,” she told me. “Cruel fate. But don’t be like me. Don’t settle for less. Don’t lower your standards.”

“What do you mean?” I levered up off the bed, draining the glass.

“Nothing,” Penny said. “New year, new me. I’m over it. I’m over him.”

“Yeah, right.” I smiled because we’d heard that before. We heard it regularly, in fact.

“New year, new me.” She drained her glass too. “You know you made this place awesome, right? This is the first classy New Year’s party I’ve ever been to. You actually did it. So get up and enjoy.”

I got up. More people had arrived, all dressed to the nines and bringing offerings—homemade Skittles vodka in bright colors, a mysterious chocolate pie baked with hash, peach-flavored champagne, pink champagne, and a half-full bottle of bourbon. Girls wore fancy dresses, guys had on shirts that buttoned, a few even with bow ties. Oscar had his pink mohawk teased up and wore pink shoes to match. Marc had on a leather vest over a crisp white shirt that looked like it might even have been ironed. In the candlelight, everything shimmered.

Wren was sucking face with the guy from the coffee shop in the kitchen area. Apparently he decided to forsake his other plans.

Everyone seemed to be having a good time and, if I squinted my eyes a little, it was all as beautiful as I’d imagined. I went over to the bar table and refilled my glass with more vodka and champagne, a smile pulling up the corners of my face.

A few more people from school came in, laughing. They’d brought prosecco and sparkly party hats. Everything started blurring together and being awesome. Penny told a filthy story about one of her cousins. Marc’s boyfriend told us about going out with a guy who had “insurance salesman” on his online dating profile, but turned out to be a preacher; the preacher tried to make a joke out of it, too, claiming that he sold religion and that was a lot like selling insurance. I told a story about how one Christmas Eve my aunt got so drunk that she peed the bed—my bed, with me in it. Everyone screamed in horror.

We played several rounds of “I Never” and when someone said, “I never wanted to make out with anyone at this party,” lots of people had to take shots.

By the time Silke arrived, I’d decided none of the Mossley kids were coming and felt relieved. Then the door opened and she stepped through, shivering in a short silvery dress, looking completely confused to find herself in a trailer. Behind her was Roth. He had three people with him, two guys and a pissed-off looking girl. Everyone but the girl looked drunk.

“You call this a party?” Roth slurred, eyes bright and hair messy. His cheeks were pinked by the cold and manic cheer.

“Who the hell are you?” Marc demanded, crossing the floor. Marc was a big guy with long hair, the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, and a soft, deep voice. Once, after I’d twisted my ankle at a mutual friend’s house, he’d carried me home in his arms like he was a superhero.

Punching rich kids was a bad idea, but I kind of hoped he’d do it anyway.

“It’s okay,” Penny said, grabbing his arm. “We invited them.”

I looked around for Wren, but she’d snuck off to the back room with her barista. “Have a drink,” I said, but I couldn’t make myself sound like I meant it.

“I don’t think so.” Roth turned toward me, his words slurring a little. “Are you the one who’s been texting lies to my girlfriend?”

“Lies?” I snorted. Penny appeared to be frozen in place, like she already knew how this would go, like she already knew she wasn’t going to be able to pretend anymore. She stumbled back, sitting down hard on one of the arms of Grandma’s sagging couch. She didn’t even seem angry with us, although she must have guessed one of us had sent the texts.

Conversations had stopped around the small room. Outside, a siren howled. Music still thrummed through the speakers of Grandma’s stereo, not loud enough.

“Are you the one he was sleeping with?” Silke asked, and I noticed her eyes were bright and red-rimmed, like she’d been crying. Then she looked past me to Penny. The moment she saw her, I think she knew. “Or was it—”

“What if I was?” I asked, interrupting, because it wasn’t fair for Penny to have to confront Silke seconds after Roth broke her heart. “You know he cheated, even if he says he didn’t. What you don’t know is that you’re the one he cheated with. You’re the other woman.”

Silke turned to Roth, shaking her head. “She was your girlfriend?”

“No! Are you crazy? I told you. I brought you here to see how pathetic they were. To understand that they’re lying. Maybe they want money. I don’t know. They’re trailer trash in a real, actual, literal trailer park. Nailing one of these girls would be worse than slumming. It would be like swimming through a sewer. I’d never get the smell out.”

His friends guffawed at that. A dude-bro Greek chorus.

No one else so much as cracked a smile. Oscar cracked his knuckles instead.

Silke looked uncomfortable.

I took my phone out of my pocket. I wasn’t as good at this as Wren would have been, but with the liquor singing through my veins, I knew I had to do something. “I have a picture of Roth here—”

“No you don’t.” Roth grabbed for the phone. “Give me that.”

I didn’t actually have a picture of him and Penny together, but Roth didn’t know that. He lunged. I turned away from him, tossing my phone toward the couch as Roth twisted my wrist hard enough to make me yell.

And then everything happened at once. Wren burst out of the back in her underwear. Marc tried to get between me and Roth. One of Roth’s friends tried to get in Marc’s way. Oscar hit somebody. I was on the floor and guys were punching one another and Wren was smashing a lamp over someone’s head and everyone was screaming.

That’s when Roth kicked the table with the punch bowl on it. The leg cracked, and the punch bowl went over, spilling a fizzing frozen strawberry and booze tide onto all the food, soaking the cheese and crackers, splashing into the hummus and onion dip, ruining the quiches. Ruining everything.

I full-on screamed. Way louder than when he bent my arm. I screamed so loud that Marc let Roth go. Bloody-nosed, Roth turned and saw my horrified face. I don’t think it was until that moment that he realized how much destroying the party would hurt me. His smile was smug and hideous.

I wanted to claw his eyes out. I wanted to hide in the back room. I wanted to go outside and sit in the cold until I was frozen all the way through. I wanted to do all those contradictory things so intensely that I did absolutely nothing at all. I just stood there, my eyes filling with tears as Roth’s smile grew into a laugh.

Then the door opened again, letting in a cold breeze that guttered the candles.

It was the beautiful Krampus boy with the goat legs and the gold paint. He must have misunderstood about dressing up for the party, because he was in a variation on his costume at the Krampuslauf. He’d paired his goat legs with a green brocade jacket stitched with silver thread and matching knee breeches with tiny silver buttons along the cuffs. Two friends were with him, both in costume. One, a girl in a white dress with a single sleeve stitched with glittering crystals. The other, a boy with waist-length blond hair. He wore pointed-eared prosthetics and a black wool Edwardian suit.

Roth and his friends looked thrown by their arrival, but they weren’t standing there with tears in their eyes and a wrecked table of food.

“We brought gifts,” the boy with the hooves said, and the blond reached into his coat and brought out a bottle of clear liquor. He removed the cork with his teeth. “Mine is holiday cheer.”

“Are you guys for real?” one of the Mossley kids said.

Roth snorted, still spoiling for a fight. Silke stepped back, into the kitchen of the trailer. A few of our friends were rearranging themselves in case Roth and the Mossley boys wanted to throw a few more punches. I was trying to edge my way to where I’d left my grandmother’s broom. If Roth tried anything else, I’d crack it over his skull.

“I brought a gift, too,” said the girl, and drew a curved knife out of her bodice. She took two steps. Before the rest of us even reacted, she had it pressed against Roth’s throat. His eyes went wide. I was pretty sure no one had ever had a knife on him before, especially not a girl. “I understand this boy was causing some trouble.”

“Are you robbing us?” the dark-haired Mossley girl asked. “Seriously? In those outfits?”

The boy with the goat legs laughed.

The blond boy with the elf ears looked from me to Penelope to Silke and then to Roth. “What ought his fate be?”

I let go of the broom and took a step toward Roth and the girl in white. “Don’t hurt him. I get the impulse, but he’ll sue.”

“Who are you?” Penny asked, awed.

“Joachim,” the Krampus boy said. “And my companions, Griselda and Isidore.”

Wren’s eyebrows went so high it was like they were trying to climb off her face. “I thought he was…”

Penny looked at me. “That’s Joachim?”

But of course, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Joachim wasn’t anyone. He didn’t exist.

“So what would you have me do with him?” Griselda asked. “I’d like my gift to be well received.”

Silke stepped out of the kitchen, moving as though drawn against her better judgment. “I want him punished.” At that, Silke turned to Penny. “Don’t you?”

Penelope walked up to Roth. His eyes widened the closer she got. And in that moment, I could see her dilemma. She could save him and indebt him to her. She could prove that she was better than his other girlfriend—better than him. But he might leave her anyway—and then she’d feel like an even bigger fool.

But she’d still be a better person.

“I don’t want him hurt,” Penny said, looking over at me. She hesitated. “But I do want him punished. You’re dressed up like a Krampus, right? So punish him like one.”

Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.

But Krampus, he brings justice. If you’re bad, you get served up a big plate of steaming hot coals. You get whipped with birch rods until you bleed. You get put in shackles and fished out of pools of ink with pitchforks. That’s the spirit of Krampus. It might look like it’s all hipsters and charity, but underneath it’s justice, and I get the appeal.

“Easily done,” Griselda said. “Boy, you’ve been an ass—and so, until you’re forgiven by these two ladies, that’s exactly what seeming you’ll take.”

Her lips went to his cheek, pressing a kiss to his skin as her blade kept him in place. As she withdrew, he began to change. Gray whiskers sprouted over his face. His neck elongated and nose flared. He was changing shape. His head was becoming the head of an animal.

I’d wished for magic, for reality to bend, but watching this, I wondered if it was possible for reality to bend so far it broke.

Roth’s two friends looked at one another, then at us and at Griselda, like they were trying to figure out who dosed them. We were all watching in gluttonous wonderment.

Roth brayed from his donkey head as Griselda put away her knife. He stumbled toward his friends. They screamed and ran for the door of the trailer. Silke edged closer to Penny, who looked as freaked out as I felt.

Joachim threw an arm over Roth’s neck, eyes dancing with mirth. “Oh, come now, it’s not so bad. You have very fine fur and a magnificent nose—a much better nose than your last one. And I’d wager you’ll like your fate betimes.”

Oscar reached out wonderingly to touch one of Roth’s twitching ears. Roth shied back, and Oscar snorted with amazed laughter. “That is some Harry Potter shit.”

“This cannot be happening,” Wren said, laughing, still in her bra and panties, one hand on her hip, looking like she’d stepped out of a forties pinup postcard. “It’s just too good.”

But it was happening. And we were drunk enough to go along with it. Even with the implications of Roth having an ass head buzzing in the back of my mind, like how if magic was real, then Joachim’s goat legs were probably not part of any costume, and when I’d left out milk for the faeries, I probably should have made sure to wash the bowl every time, I was focused on propping up the broken table. I couldn’t stand around freaking out forever. Some people helped me mop the spilled punch. I rinsed off the cheese and scraped off the top layer of hummus. It turned out I still had some chips left in the bags out in the kitchen, so I refilled the bowls. Most bottles of booze hadn’t gotten broken. Some of the food couldn’t be salvaged, but in the face of magic being real and magical creatures in attendance, I was ready to declare the party a success anyway.

Isidore poured shots from his bottle into aperitif glasses set up on Grandma’s kitchen counter. The liquor tasted like thyme and caraway seeds and burned all the way down my throat. Griselda taught us a drinking song. We screamed the words as we danced around the room, spinning madly and jumping on the furniture.

Someone found an apple for Roth to eat.

Near midnight, we turned the television to MTV, where they showed the ball dropping in Times Square. We counted down with everyone else.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

We went crazy shrieking and blowing paper horns and kissing one another. People yelled out the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne,” Isidore singing lines I didn’t know. We two have run about the slopes and picked the daisies fine. And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And then I found myself in the hall, kissing Joachim, a boy I barely knew, a boy with a pretend name and who might be a demon or a faerie or a disturbing hallucination.

My head was swimming. My hands were tangled in his hair, and I pushed him against the wall. His breath caught as I tugged his mouth to mine. I had no idea what I was doing.

Then Ahmet changed playlists to some louder, madder, midnight stuff, and we were dancing again. We danced and drank, drank and danced until the mix ran out and Ahmet fell asleep under the table, his arm thrown over Griselda.

At five in the morning, I found myself bundled up in a moth-eaten fur coat from Grandma’s closet, slumped in a chair at the plastic table as the sun began to burn the frozen horizon. I had a coupe glass full of cinnamon schnapps the color of Rudolf’s nose.

Joachim was smoking a cigarette of meadow grass and comfrey. He’d found a bottle of bubble solution and held up the wand, exhaling smoke into each delicate shimmering globe, grinning up at them as they got carried up into the dawn.

He was the kind of beautiful that got under your skin. Before, my crushes had been on normal-looking boys—pudgy boys and beanpole skinny ones, boys with bad haircuts and boys with shadowy mustaches they were trying to grow, boys with crooked teeth and spotty skin. No one would probably believe me, but Joachim’s ridiculous hotness made me uncomfortable. He was like a painting you wanted to burn so you could finally stop staring at it. Copper gold hair and copper gold eyes. Looping curls. He looked like something you were allowed to look at, but never touch.

I remembered the warm slide of his lips.

“Why Joachim?” I asked him.

He looked over at me, a little bit drunk and clearly baffled. It made me happy to know that whatever he was, however he looked, he still could get wasted on New Year’s.

“The name,” I said.

He laughed, throwing his head back and glancing up at the stars. “You bargained with the universe, remember?”

The words sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t even remember exactly what I’d said or promised, but I knew I’d done it. “And the universe heard me?”

“Nah.” Above his head, a bubble burst, releasing a supernova of smoke before it was blown shapeless by the wind. “But I did. Lots of things hear when you make rash offers like that.”

“So you want—?” I was rigid with alarm, trying to think through the fog of alcohol.

He shook his head, throwing me an easy smile. “Not a thing. I just remembered the name when I saw you at the Krampuslauf. We don’t have names, not like you do. Isidore and Griselda have been called many things before and will be called many things again. Names, they just don’t stick to us. But I like Joachim, and I knew you liked it as well.”

I tried to imagine a name sliding off of me, as though not quite attached. It felt wrong, like losing one’s shadow. I’d always been Hanna, and I couldn’t imagine not being her. “Why were you even at that thing?”

“The Krampuslauf?” He had a rich throaty laugh. “I wanted to be among people without any disguise. It’s a great prank, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” I took a swig from my cup. It tasted like someone had melted those cinnamon hearts into a thick syrup. I wondered who’d brought it. I wondered why I’d decided to drink it and then took another swig.

“I owe you a gift,” he said, into the silence. “Griselda brought something and Isidore brought something. Now it’s my turn. Only name your desire, and I will do my best to give you its pale approximation.”

That made me laugh. “I’m glad you came. And turning Roth into a donkey was way more than enough.”

“My people are often beseeched for favors, but seldom invited to share in feasts,” he spoke with a sly humor, as though he was talking formally half in jest—but only half. “Let me give you a gift for being made so much welcome.”

“Okay,” I said, relenting, looking back at the trailer. Faint music had started up inside, and I could see people moving around. They’d gotten a second wind. Soon someone would come outside and drag us back into the dregs of the after-after-party. Soon after that, I’d collapse in Grandma’s bed along with as many people as would fit. Soon it would be morning and for all I knew, Joachim and Griselda and Isidore would be gone at first light, like dew burned up in the sun. “Okay. What I want is to never forget there’s magic in the world. I get to keep my memories of tonight. I get to keep them always.”

His smile went crooked. Leaning over, he mashed his cigarette in Grandma’s heavy glass ashtray and pressed his lips to my forehead. He smelled like burning grass.

“I promise,” he whispered, mouth hot against my skin.

And, although I was, admittedly, not even a little bit sober, that was the moment I decided that since magic was real, since I conjured up Joachim by the sheer power of wanting him to happen, since I’d made this party out of two hundred bucks and sheer determination, then maybe I was wrong about the things I thought I couldn’t have, that weren’t for me. Maybe it was okay to imagine greater things. Maybe it was all for me, if I wanted it.

With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.